Wednesday, January 28, 2015

INITIATIVE CARNIVAL COMING NEXT YEAR

If voters get annoyed and sick of
seeing paid petition circulators outside their favorite big box stores during
the next 15 months, they will have only themselves to blame.

Low voter turnout is one big reason to
expect a larger-than ever proliferation of ballot initiatives looking to share
the fall 2016 ballot with presidential and U.S. Senate candidates. If you
didn’t vote last year, you’re part of the reason for any upcoming initiative
annoyances.

As usual, it will take valid
signatures amounting to 5 percent of the total vote in the last general
election to qualify an ordinary initiative for the ballot and 8 percent to put
a constitutional amendment before the voters. One year ago, those percentages
meant it took just over 504,000 signatures for a regular initiative to become a
proposition and about 807,000 for a constitutional change. The extreme low
November turnout means it will take only about 366,000 and 586,000 voter
signatures, respectively, this time.

That lowers the cost to qualify
measures by well over $1 million each and allows a wide variety of interest
groups frustrated by legislative inaction on their pet causes to circulate
petitions in the next few months.

There is, of course, no rush. In
previous election cycles, some initiative sponsors sought to get their
proposals onto the June primary election ballot. But since passage of a 2012
law that consolidates all voter-qualified measures on the fall ballot, there
have been no initiatives to vote on in June. This makes the primary ballot less
interesting and helps lower turnout then. Because initiative sponsors have
almost six months to gather their signatures, they don’t really have to get
serious until autumn of this year at the earliest.

Democrats passed the fall-only law
knowing voter turnout is far larger in November elections than in primaries, often
doubling or tripling the spring numbers. November voters are on average much
younger and more ethnic than in June, a trend that escalates in presidential
election years like 2016.

All this will likely translate into as
long a ballot as Californians have ever seen, even surpassing some of the
book-length ones of the 1990s.

Anti-tax activists warn of a
proliferation of proposed new and renewed levies, including an extension of the
2012 Proposition 30 sales and income tax hikes, parts of which expire at the
end of next year. They warn of a renewed bid for a state oil extraction tax –
California remains the only oil-producing state that does not tax drilling by
the barrel. Opponents warn this could cause higher gas prices, and it might
also dampen industry enthusiasm for hydraulic fracking of reserves in the
Monterey Shale geologic formation stretching from Monterey and San Benito
counties south into Los Angeles, Kern and Ventura counties.

Anti-tax folks also fear an initiative
to slap another $2 atop the current 87-cent tax on each pack of cigarettes.
This one would be billed as a boost for public health.

And they worry about a proposal to
lower Proposition 13’s two-thirds-majority requirement for passage of school
bonds and parcel taxes either to a simple majority or to the 55 percent now
needed to pass school construction bonds.

Already qualified is a referendum to
eliminate the legislatively-passed statewide ban on plastic grocery bags, which
would leave that issue purely a local decision. This would allow bag
manufacturers – first to take advantage of the lowered signature thresholds –
to continue selling 9 billion more plastic bags in the state yearly than if the
ban becomes effective.

It’s not unheard-of for voters to
reverse decisions by their elected lawmakers. They did it last fall by
overturning state approval of an off-reservation Indian casino and they did it
in 1982, nixing the so-called “Peripheral Canal” plan for bringing additional
Northern California river water to Central Valley farms and Southern
California.

Besides
all these measures, marijuana proponents will likely present a plan to legalize
pot completely and tax it, a la Colorado. There also could be an effort to
alter Proposition 13 to tax commercial real estate at higher rates than
residential property. A minimum wage increase proposal is also in the works, as
are several ideas for changing public employee pensions.

Put it together and the prospects are
high for an initiative carnival, one of California’s most interesting and
important ballots ever.

-30-
Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book,
"The Burzynski Breakthrough, The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the
Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover
fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net

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About Me

Thomas Elias writes the syndicated California Focus column, appearing twice weekly in 88 newspapers around California, with circulation over 2.2 million.
He has won numerous awards from organizations like the National Headliners Club, the California Newspaper Publishers Association, the Los Angeles Press Club, and the California Taxpayers Association. He has been nominated three times for the Pulitzer Prize in distinguished commentary.
Elias is the author of two books, "The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government's Campaign to Squelch It" (now in its third edition; also published in Japanese and recently optioned for a television movie) and "The Simpson Trial in Black and White," co-authored with the late Dennis Schatzman.